With Exploring Stories, we aim to illustrate how literature belongs at the heart of the public debate. Because literature begins where the news ends. Those who aim to understand the world cannot do so without the imagination of writers, whose stories and novels hold a mirror to our world view, add to it, correct it, or even turn it upside down. 

Download the time schedule here (in Dutch)

Once again this year, fiction writers will sit down with journalists, philosophers and scientists to discuss issues like the climate, inequality, old and new forms of colonialism, feminism and the war in Ukraine. Ayelet Gundar-Goshen and Inge Shilperoord will have a conversation on what it's like when the place where you live doesn't feel like home. Sharon Dodua Otoo and Dalilla Hermans have both written about racism, Dodua Otoo in Ada's Realm and Hermans in her theatre and columns, and they will have a conversation on the subject.

Tash Aw will come to discuss his novel We, The Survivors and will discuss the relationship between being and immigrant and the value of human life. He will speak with Sulaiman Addonia. Nominee for the European Literature Prize Doireann Ní Ghríofa will explore the (supposed) tensions between authorship and motherhood alongside Ester Naomi Perquin.

Writer and cultural critic Olivia Laing, author of Everybody: A Book About Freedom, and Raven van Dorst will have a conversation with Marian Donner, author of Book of Selfdestruction, on what it means to have a body. Furthermore, Madeline Miller (who will be present online) and Natalie Haynes will discuss how their retelling of old myths can disprove myths about the role of women in the world.

Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason, known for On Time and Water, discusses the relation between telling stories and climate change. He will be having a conversation with Ellen de Bruin. The war in Ukraine will also be subject, and especially the prehistory of that war, of the conversation between Oksana Zaboejzko and Sasha Marianna Salzmann. They will be interviewed by Franka Hummels.

Author of controversial novels and unusual short stories A.M. Homes is present online, and will be interviewed by Niña Weijers. Dutch labour politician Marjolein Moorman, known from the documentary series Klassen, will be there to discuss the inequality of opportunity in our education system. British dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson will be there to close the event. He will be interviewed by actrice and singer Joy Wielkens.